Yerusha: Uniting Jewish Archival Heritage in Europe

Yerusha is a digital humanities initiative of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. It is an online archival catalogue, featuring thousands of in-depth archival descriptions giving researchers access to a wealth of records covering all major subjects of Jewish history.

The starting point of the Yerusha project is the scattered nature of European Jewish archival heritage. Millions of pages of Jewish and Jewish-related documents written in dozens of languages are stored in hundreds of locations. These archival materials are essential to understanding the social, economic and political history of Jews across Europe. However, access to these archives is often hampered by lack of visibility, inadequate cataloguing, poor storage conditions and scant information about their location and content. The pressing need we have identified when we started the project was the necessity to create an online international catalogue which gathers and presents all available information about these collections and helps researchers navigate through these materials.

To this end we have built an extensive network of institutions and with their professional help we have carried out more than 40 projects to map and describe Jewish archives. We have been active in 28 European countries and worked in 550 archival institutions from Russia to Spain and from Sweden to Greece. By the outstanding work of close to 150 professionals (historians, archivists, Jewish studies scholars, translators, editors, programmers) we have gathered information on almost 20,000 archival collections.

The presentation will include an overview of the project as well as a demonstration of the database’s content and features.